NEED TO KNOW
Paige Suisted, 27, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer after the right side of her body started to go numb in April 2024
“I have a younger brother and sister, and all I could think about was wanting to see them grow up,” she told Daily Mail Australia
Suisted has since been deemed a “medical anomaly” as her “golf ball-sized tumor” seems to have disappeared on recent brain scans
A woman once diagnosed with terminal cancer has been declared a medical miracle after her recent scans came back clear.
Back in April 2024, Paige Suisted, from Kiwi, New Zealand, was living her life as “normal,” spending her days modeling and working at a local jeweler. But one day, she noticed that the fingers on her right hand were starting to go numb — and it didn’t take long before her arms and legs followed suit.
“My fingers kind of just stopped working,” Suisted, 27, recalled to Daily Mail Australia, noting that she received differing opinions from multiple doctors. “One said I had a stroke, but didn’t even admit me to the hospital. Another said I had Raynaud’s disease, and one just put me in a sling. They all told me something completely different.”
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Hospital (stock image)
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Having grown increasingly desperate, Suisted eventually called an ambulance and pleaded to be admitted to a hospital for proper testing. After weeks of CT scans, MRIs and a brain biopsy, she was diagnosed with stage-four astrocytoma, a terminal cancer often found in children.
“When they told me, I think I screamed and cried,” she told Daily Mail Australia. “It was so hard to hear. I have a younger brother and sister, and all I could think about was wanting to see them grow up.”
After discovering that the golf ball-sized tumor in her brain was pushing on the nerves controlling the right side of her body, doctors determined that surgical removal would be too risky.
“It was a 50–50 chance it would work, and a 50–50 chance I’d be fully paralyzed, most likely not able to talk or walk again,” Suisted recalled to the outlet. “So, we decided we weren’t doing that.”
Suisted immediately began to undergo radiation and chemotherapy.
“The terminal diagnosis broke a lot of us down. I thought I was going to die and there’s nothing anyone can do,” she recalled. “At the start of chemo, it really shot me down. I wasn’t even aware of what was going on.”
After a year of treatment and debilitating symptoms, many of which she documented on Instagram, doctors were shocked to find that, one day, Suisted’s brain scans appeared to come back clear.
“In my last few scans, there’s been nothing there,” she told Daily Mail Australia. “This massive golf ball in my brain … we can’t see any of it on the MRIs.”
While doctors can’t officially declare Suisted cancer-free without performing surgery to make sure there aren’t any remaining cancer cells, multiple professional opinions have deemed her a “medical anomaly,” and she has since been on a journey to regain her independence and confidence while advocating for others facing the disease.
“They haven’t had a cancer patient like this,” she said of her doctors. “They don’t even understand it themselves. I just live my life every day now, and I want to help other people.”
Read the original article on People